Partnership to develop Clinical LC methods for rapid TDM Analysis

A new collaboration between Shimadzu and leading German research facility, the University Medical Centre Göttingen (UMG) will focus on the development of new clinical laboratory methods using liquid chromatography - mass spectrometry (LC-MS) for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) analysis. Measuring the concentration of drugs currently in the blood is important for determining the required next dosages of medication eg in the form of antibiotics, antiepileptics and antidepressants; a swift turnaround of test results is therefore especially important for emergency patients who demand a special treatment, or who are in intensive care.

While conventionally methods for conducting TDM tests has been the use of immunoassays, more recently clinical laboratories have been turning to LC-MS systems for this purpose, which can provide advantages of greater accuracy and flexibility. 

However, despite this overall superiority, methods using LC-MS have previously been difficult to apply in emergency cases because of the complexity of sample preparation. For instance, the high flexibility of the LC-MS system also means that each target group of drugs requires its own column, mobile phase and analysis conditions such as temperature. This means that it can take time to switch methods to start a new sample analysis, making it difficult for a clinical laboratory to quickly return analysis results to the doctors who need them.

Further progression and testing of Shimadzu's CLAM-2030, which has shown high potential in simplifying, streamlining and speeding up LC-MS testing, forms the core of the new collaboration between the company and leading experts at UMG, including Professor Andreas Fischer and Dr. Frank Streit, who will work on the development of  new methods for multiple target groups of drugs. The team will also optimise these new methods on CLAM-2030 for fast and easy switching. 

The collaboration with UMG takes place under the auspices of Shimadzu’s ambitious European Innovation Centre (EUIC) program, aimed at bringing top-level expertise in science, technology and society together with advances in technology to create new and better solutions for tomorrow.

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